French Community Day 2010 – Experts share passion!

French Community Day 2010 – Experts share passion!

Ever wonder what a Microsoft community event is really like? Check out this guest post written by France MVP Leads Martine Thiphaine and Livia Formisani. They provide an in-depth look at the full agenda which includes - notable speakers, interactive product sessions, and an IT spin on a classic game. To enjoy the French translation, please scroll to the bottom of this post.

Earlier this month, French Community
experts from all over the country got together at the Microsoft France headquarters
in Paris for the Microsoft Community Day.
About 100 experts from online and offline technical communities joined the event, despite
the severe snow which caused cancellations and heavy delays of flights and
trains. The Microsoft Community Day gathered MVPs, MSPs, CPL (Communautés Partenaires
en Ligne – Online Partner Communities) and MUG (Microsoft User Groups) in
a unique event, to give them all the opportunity to interact and network with
each other, as it is in the spirit of the Microsoft communities.

The
day started with a keynote from the Microsoft France community leaders -
Martine Thiphaine (MVP), Julie Knibbe and Matthieu Dordolo (MSP),
Nicolas Tann (CPL), Xavier Rosee and Mamoun Benmeradi (MUG) - followed
by a plenary session called: “3 screens, 1 cloud”, about computer, Windows
Phone 7, Kinect and their interactions all day long with a user.

After a small break, the audience divided into three groups to follow the three
sessions about the cloud: Consumer offerings, SaaS, and IaaS / PaaS, which
presented the whole range of Microsoft cloud solutions. After lunch, the
afternoon agenda was also divided into several contemporary sessions for IT Pro
and Developers, about Windows Phone development, Internet Explorer 9, Test
tools in Visual Studio 2010 and Web development. The sessions included also two
round tables, one about Microsoft Forums, and the other about IIS/ASP.NET,
where the community experts had the chance to share some direct feedbacks with
Microsoft employees.

Feedback was especially appreciated at the Microsoft Forums round table where the attendees interacted with 5
Microsoft speakers: Giampaolo Battaglia and Antoine Emond, French
Audience Marketing Managers respectively for TechNet and MSDN, Florian
Eichinger, Regional Program Manager EMEA for the Microsoft Forums, and Roxana
Panait and Alexandru Petrescu, Forum Engineers for TechNet and MSDN.

The keynote of Bernard Ourghanlian, DPE Lead and also Technical &
Security Director of Microsoft France, closed the cycle of sessions. Bernard
kept the audience totally frozen in their seats and starry-eyed with insights on security topics and a well-done Q&A about the future of security and of
Microsoft products.

After the
sessions and the dinner, the attendees were divided in teams by the color of
their entry badge (finally resolving the mystery of the different badge colors
everybody wondered about since the beginning), and the six teams gathered in the
main conference room. The enigma was then explained: the teams would have
played against each other in an IT version of the game “Pictionary”.

The presenter let one member for each team on
the stage, in rounds, and showed him a card with a MS product, service or application,
which he had to draw on a graphics tablet connected to the main screen, while
his team had to guess it. It was really difficult: imagine how to draw BizTalk
or COM. Can you? Well, the Community experts surely could! Between laughs, bad
attempts of drawing V2P, and a bit of competition, a team of 6 experts won some cool Microsoft prizes.

During the evening the fun continued with the two Kinect the attendees had at
their disposal, which caused everybody to dance (and some dancefloor runaways
to play bowling), and with a real magician who entertained the impressed
attendees. Luckily our photo expert Laurent Gébeau
was there, ready to take beautiful pictures of our Kinectian efforts.

Thank
you Laurent for your beautiful pictures of the event!

A
great event deserves a great memory. That´s why during the evening, a wall was
set up near the exit, with two photographers holding Polaroid machines, taking
pictures of the attendees: the result has been immortalized by Laurent in a
masterly Photosynth,
available here.